In the modern university, each individual student is free to pursue almost any interest, without having to be harnessed to what his intellectual ancestors thought was worth knowing. But this freedom m...
Bottom line—the options we consider usually suffer from comparison with other options.
Almost by definition, to be a maximizer is to have high standards, high expectations. Because of this, and because of the role played by expectations in hedonic evaluations, an experience that is on t...
This phenomenon is called the endowment effect. Once something is given to you, it’s yours. Once it becomes part of your endowment, even after a very few minutes, giving it up will entail a loss. And,...
The illusion that each person can have the body that he or she wants is especially painful for women, and especially in societies, like ours, in which the ideal body is extremely thin.
So, to be better prepared for, and less disappointed by adaptation: As you buy your new car, acknowledge that the thrill won’t be quite the same two months after you own it. Spend less time looking fo...
So even before your eyes are more than half open—long before you’ve had your first cup of coffee—you’ve made a dozen choices or more. But they don’t count, really, as choices. You could have done othe...
One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.
Identity is much less a thing people inherit than it used to be.
I believe that one of the reasons that maximizers are less happy, less satisfied with their lives, and more depressed than satisficers is precisely because the taint of trade-offs and opportunity cost...
The modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall.
His book Choosing the Right Pond, economist Robert Frank exposes just how much of social life is determined by our desire to be big fish in our own ponds. If there were only one pond—if everyone compa...
So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.
Seligman’s discovery of learned helplessness has had a monumental impact in many different areas of psychology. Hundreds of studies leave no doubt that we can learn that we don’t have control.
Now students are required to make choices about education that may affect them for the rest of their lives. And they are forced to make these choices at a point in their intellectual development when...
Most of us think about empathy as a feeling or an emotion. It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able...
In a world of scarcity, opportunities don't present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection.
Clearly, the cumulative opportunity cost of adding options to one’s choice set can reduce satisfaction. It may even make a person miserable.
When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their li...
What Seligman and his colleagues proposed was that when people are looking for causes for failure, they display a variety of predispositions to accept one type of cause or another, quite apart from wh...